“I am not nostalgic by nature and I had no time for a trip down Memory Lane.” All installation images: Anders Sune Berg “When the Royal Danish Library contacted me with the idea of a ‘Nick Cave Exhibition’ I was reluctant to get involved,” he said in a statement. Yet the artist and musician admitted he was initially hesitant about doing the exhibition. Elsewhere, Cave has hosted intimate public talks and, for the past two years, he has used his website The Red Hand Files as a direct forum for the public to ask him about his life and work. Previous Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds albums have been accompanied by DVDs, hardcovers and replica notebooks, each revealing generous detail about the band’s inner workings. “I was curious both about how he was a storyteller in his songs of course and in his novels, but also how he created these narratives about himself as a person throughout his career and recreated those narratives all the time,” Back tells CR of how the exhibition came to be.Ĭave is no stranger to giving fans a glimpse under the bonnet. The exhibition is structured into eight rooms, with each installation strewn with endless towers of books, along with drafts, original artwork, handwritten lyrics, diaries, photographs, videos, and found objects.Īltogether, the show features over 300 artefacts either collected or created by Cave, who contributed heavily to the curation alongside designer and Royal Danish Library curator Christina Back, and Janine Barrand of Arts Centre Melbourne. Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition is a labyrinthine journey through the musician’s life and creative career, as told through his extensive archive. Having now opened, its distinctly lived-in aesthetic unwittingly holds a mirror up to the way many of us have been living for the past few months: faced by the inner recesses of our own worlds. The show, held at the Black Diamond in Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Library, had been postponed for several months as the pandemic took hold around the world.

Nick Cave’s new exhibition is one of the earliest to open following the pandemic, and it seems like a particularly appropriate way to emerge from lockdown.

Stranger than kindness exhibition 2022